1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an ink-jet printing apparatus and an ink-jet printing method. More specifically, the invention relates to an ink-jet printing apparatus performing printing by ejecting an ink to a cloth.
2. Description of the Related Art
As a typical textile printing apparatus, there are known apparatuses which employ a roller textile printing method for forming a continues pattern by impressing or carving a pattern on a peripheral surface of a roller and pressing the roller on a material cloth, or employ a screen textile printing method for directly printing a desired image on the cloth or so forth by preparing screens for a number corresponding to colors and patterns to be overlaid.
Such textile printing apparatus employing the roller textile printing method or the screen textile printing method requires large amount of process steps and working days in preparation of the roller or the screens. Furthermore, such textile printing apparatus requires a lot of operations in preparing respective colors of inks required for printing, indexing of the roller or the screens. Also, size of such apparatus is large, and becomes further larger in proportion to a number of colors to be used in the apparatus to require relatively large space for installation. Furthermore, a storage space for the roller or the screens also becomes necessary.
On the other hand, an ink-jet type printing apparatus to be used as a printing device of a printer, a copy machine, a facsimile and so forth or as an output device of a composite type electronic equipment including a computer, a wordprocessor and so forth, workstation and so forth has been practiced. There is a proposal for employing such ink-jet type printing apparatus for performing textile printing by directly ejecting an ink to a cloth, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication Nos. 57750/1987 and 31594/1988, for example.
The ink-jet type printing apparatus performs printing by ejecting the ink to a medium to be printed (hereinafter referred to as printing medium). The ink-jet type printing apparatus holds various advantages in that an ink-jet head can be made compact easily, high definition image can be printed at high speed, a running cost is low, a noise level is low for non-impact type printing, a multi-color printing employing a plurality of colors of inks can be done easily, and so forth.
Particularly, an ink-jet head of the type ejecting the ink utilizing a thermal energy can be easily produced with a high density liquid path arrangement (a high density orifice arrangement) by forming an electrothermal transducer element, an electrode, a liquid path wall, an upper plate and so forth by employing a semiconductor fabrication process, such as etching, deposition, sputtering and so forth. Therefore, further down-sizing of the ink-jet head can be achieved.
However, when a cloth is employed as the printing medium in the ink-jet printing apparatus for textile printing, various technical problems are naturally arisen.
For example, the following problems are arisen in the textile printing employing ink-jet type printing technology.
The cloth as generally referred to includes wide variety including natural fiber, such as cotton, silk, wool and so forth, or synthetic fiber, such as nylon, polyester, acryl and so forth. Depending on the kind of the cloth, property and characteristics associated with textile printing is inherently differentiated.
A relationship between dye and dye-affinity of the fibers is shown in the following table 1. As can be clear from the table 1, for cloths of the fibers having the same or similar dye-affinity, the same adapted ink may be employed, whereas when the cloth is fabricated from fibers having different dye-affinity, such as mixed fiber spinning of nylon and cotton, it is desirable to use a plurality of different inks respectively adapted to respective fibers.
__________________________________________________________________________ DYE AND DYE-AFFINITY OF FIBER Salt Dye Complex Base Acid Sulfidi- Fiber Direct Acid Salt (Cation) Mordant Vat zation Naphthol Dispersion Reaction Pigment __________________________________________________________________________ Cotton, .largecircle. .circleincircle. .circleincircle. .circleincircle. .circleincircle. .circleincircle. Hemp, Rayon Wool, Silk .largecircle. .circleincircle. .circleincircle. .largecircle. .circleincircle. .largecircle. .largecircle. Acetate .largecircle. .largecircle. .largecircle. .circleincircle. .largecircle. Nylon .largecircle. .circleincircle. .circleincircle. .largecircle. .circleincircle. .largecircle. .largecircle. .largecircle. .largecircle. Polyester .circleincircle. .largecircle. Acryl .largecircle. .largecircle. .circleincircle. .largecircle. .largecircle. Vinylon .largecircle. .largecircle. .largecircle. .largecircle. .circleincircle. .largecircle. .largecircle. __________________________________________________________________________ .circleincircle.: high dyeaffinity is shown .largecircle.: can be dyed
For this, it is possible to consider to repeat printing operation for the number of kinds of fibers having different dye-affinity with exchanging inks to be used. However, it requires maintaining precision in positioning with respect to the printing medium and causes a complicated exchanging operation of the inks to cancel convenience of the ink-jet textile printing apparatus.
In contrast to this, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 7-117223, for example, proposes a method for printing the same image on the printing medium with employing a plurality of ink-jet heads which can eject a plurality of kinds of inks for fibers having mutually different dye-affinity, with the same tone.
However, even when the ink and the fiber is adapted for the inks of the same tone in view of dye-affinity as set for above, color development should be differentiated depending upon combination of the dye used in the ink and the fiber. Therefore, even when printing is performed for the same image, it is not possible to always obtain the same tone with different combination. In this case, it becomes difficult to expect the tone of the overall textile print product to perform color matching.
It is considered to perform color matching of the textile print product by performing adjustment and setting of the parameter on the image processing adapting to various conditions depending upon the cloth to be used. However, the conditions, such as kind of fiber, fiber mixing ratio, texture constituting the cloth are different depending upon application. Therefore, parameter adjusting operation on the image processing associated with color matching becomes complicated.